Robert Elswit Wins the ASC Outstanding Achievement Award

Robert Elswit, ASC won the feature film competition for There Will Be Blood at the 22nd annual American Society of Cinematographers Outstanding Achievement Awards. The story opens in a small California town at the turn of the 20th century where Daniel Day-Lewis portrays a local citizen who prospects for oil and strikes it rich while vying with and manipulating his family, neighbors and industry moguls. It’s an emotional story with dark overtones of greed and vengence. There Will Be Blood marks Elswit’s sixth collaboration with director Paul Thomas Anderson.

They chose to compose the story in widescreen, anamorphic format using spherical lenses to capture the scope of the land and other settings. Elswit blended light and darkness, textures, contrast and all the colors of the rainbow to paint a vividly compelling picture of a seminal period in American history. He and Anderson chose to use traditional photo-optical post-production techniques to put final touches on an organic look which augments the emotional flow of the story. The images look and feel natural as though you have been magically transported to another time and place. There Will Be Blood was produced by Miramax and Paramount Vantage. Elswit is currently preparing to shoot Tony Gilroy’s Duplicity, starring Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, in New York.